This past week, I've been coming across a lot of news about robots. The space industry is full of them -- they help us dig, rove, grapple, analyze, and explore. The NASA Lunar Regolith Excavation Challenge this weekend has 23 robotic entrants. And not to mention the 21 teams building robots for the Google Lunar X PRIZE...

But robots are certainly becoming prevalent in our society outside of high-tech arenas like the space industry. Yesterday I came across this article from the Boston Globe with 32 images of robots. While it includes several from NASA (the Mars Science Laboratory, ATHLETE, and the K-10 Rover), the article also covers robots for military, industrial, human aid, and just-for-fun purposes. For example, here is a robot making tea:

And some of the robots are just downright creepy. Seriously, have you seen "Big Dog"? Here is a video:

This Friday we'd like to see what cool robots you know about. The rules are loose here: the robots can be real or fictional, or even a human impersonating a robot to music. Submit a comment or link either here or via your favorite social media tool and I will post them. Bonus for video of robots in action!______________________________________________________________________________________

@mrdoornbos submits an @Evadotbot named Hal (our 4000th follower on Twitter, by the way). You can find him online here.

@HarbingerAlpha brings us... Robot Jam? Whoa.

@NextGiantLeap shares robots that are "Lost in Space"!

From @amoroso, a fun-looking, self-balancing robotic unicycle from Honda. Maybe we can convince Google to spring for one of these for our X PRIZE office?

@jimmic sends us the ultimate 80's robot, Optimus Prime, and in the process reveals to us how he grew up to be a tech geek working on spacesuits:

Via @Quarkspin, Kiva Systems in ur warehouse, organizin' ur boxes:

@drewbenn sends us Tweenbots... little robots sent out to explore the vastness of cityspace.